


The Duke and Duchess of Unkempt Hair

by stormbornslytherin (orphan_account)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:17:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1923003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/stormbornslytherin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ron's read an article, and a conversation becomes unexpectedly serious.</p><p>[This is a response to the Rita Skeeter Daily Prophet piece released earlier, so it would help if you've read that but I don't think its necessary.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Duke and Duchess of Unkempt Hair

By now the excitement of the 2014 Quidditch World Cup was waning in most wizarding households. It was unseasonably warm even for July, and the hazy sheen of midsummer seemed to hang over even the most chaotic of magical dwellings across Britain, giving way to lazy, quiet mornings.

Predictably, the Weasley-Granger household was the exception to this rule.

Even more predictably, the person responsible for near maniacal energy was neither the freckled, ginger eight year old girl nor her slightly darker six year old brother calmly eating breakfast at the kitchen table, Rose engrossed in the book propped against her cereal bowl and Hugo laughing at a muggle cartoon on the television set in the background. (There was typically a firm “No books or television at mealtimes” rule for both of these children, but this went largely ignored during the summer months, at least as far as breakfast was concerned.)

In fact, the chaos on this particular morning was being orchestrated by a tall, slender man in his mid-thirties who was examining his reflection in his bathroom mirror, his expression pained, his hands frantically opening bathroom cupboards and drawers for a hand mirror he knew his wife kept somewhere.

“Darling, come and look at my hair from the back!” Ron yelled, unsure whether Hermione was puttering around their bedroom or tending to their children downstairs. She wasn’t exactly a morning person, Hermione, and she tended to flit from room to room quite a bit with a toothbrush or comb or mascara wand bemoaning the “state of this house” before her second cup of tea.

“Don’t shout,” she replied automatically, emerging from the wardrobe closet in a bra and pantyhose to give her husband a disapproving frown from across the room and missing the telltale open newspaper on her husband’s side of the bed. “All right, what have you done to it?”

“I haven’t _done anything_ to it, Hermione. Just—is it thin, would you say? Would you, for example, describe me—bloody mirror’s gone and disappeared—as a man with hair that’s…thinning? It’s not, is it? Is it?”

Hermione sighed laboriously. “Ronald, if this is indicative of the fact that you have gone and read the article your best friend specifically requested you not go on and read, then I certainly can’t be bothered to dignity this, ah, this fit of vanity with a response.”

Ron ignored her, which was hard to do as she was now standing mere inches from his face wearing an expression he could imagine and therefore chose not to witness for himself. This was actually a shame, as he would have probably enjoyed looking at the rest of her.

“And anyway,” Hermione pressed on, “If you had bothered to read the whole thing and not just skimmed for your own name, you’d realize that if anyone in this family should be offended by hair-related commentary, it’s your wife!”

“Aha!” Ron yelled in wild triumph. “So you’ve read it too, then.”

Hermione groaned. “I don’t know what it is about this woman’s absolute drivel. It’s like a car wreck! You can’t look away!”

Ron was puzzled by this expression but let it go. “But…you think it’s gone thinner, then.”

“Honestly, Ron, I hadn’t noticed.”

Ron looked as though she had just admitted the graphic details of decades-long affair with Victor Krum. “You hadn’t….you hadn’t noticed? What on earth does that mean? You’ve just resigned yourself to a baldy, hideous husband already, have you? Christ, Hermione, I’m not even thirty-five yet! Mum always said, ‘Ron, you don’t have to worry about going the way of your father, you’ve got your Uncle Billius’ hair, it’s nice and thick’, and it turns out this is another thing she’s gone and lied about!”

Hermione bit back laughter. “Ron, she was nasty about all of us. She said Harry was going gray.”

“Well, he is, isn’t he? You see it round the temples.”

“I think it makes him look distinguished.”

“Bully for him, then!” Ron was shouting again.

“Ron, of all the things she said about you, this is what you choose to get upset by?”  Hermione instantly regretted her choice of words, fearing they would open a box she'd long since closed.

But Ron appeared surprisingly prepared for this. “Look, Hermione, all that other stuff—well, it’s nothing I don’t hear every day, you know? I heard it when I entered the ministry with Harry, certainly when I quit to run the shop. A lot of people in the department assumed I just couldn’t hack it as an Auror and that’s why I left, or that I was sick of being in Harry’s shadow. Frankly I _was_ sick of it, Skeeter’s not wrong. It’s healthier now we don’t work together; I actually miss him sometimes.”

Hermione sat cautiously on the edge of the bed. Ron’s moments of self-awareness were more frequent now that they were older, but she still never tired of them, not after what felt like a lifetime of having to keep reassuring him, no she wouldn’t prefer to marry Harry instead, followed by another lifetime of worrying that it was all true, that she might pity her husband rather than love him. “So then…” she prompted.

“So, well, that’s just it, isn’t it? Someone could write an article every day about poor old Weasley, second fiddle to his best friend, possible cuckhold, earns less than his wife does at any rate, trying to replace his brother’s dead twin at a bloody joke shop, laughingstock of the wizarding community, no pun intended, and I think I’d be all right, honestly. I understand, now, why these things get said, and it’s not....not because they’re true.” There was something fierce illuminating the blue of Ron’s eyes, now.

(It was disturbingly arousing, actually. Hermione had to force herself to consider the fact that it was approximately seven fifteen in the morning and she was trying to get everyone’s clothes on, not the other way around.)

She made a motion for him to keep going and bit down hard on her lip. 

“But since I know none of it’s true, what happens if my hair is thinning? What does that say about the rest of it, Hermione? Fuck, I don’t know.” He ran a hand through the aforementioned hair, having worked himself back up into a veritable frenzy.

 Well, now she was done for. Hermione Granger would rather go to her grave than admit this, but it so happened a well-placed fuck practically unzipped her skirt all on its own, and she knew there was no way she’d even make the half-day at work on time.

She also knew that her marriage was something people speculated on almost as frequently as they speculated on Harry and Ginny’s, and that this was a conversation they probably expected she and Ron had almost daily.  A few of her work girlfriends had even alluded to this after several rounds at the pub, wanting to know if Ron had gotten over his famous insecurities, if it drove her crazy having to walk on eggshells, if he was as boorish as he’d been at school.

If she’d chosen wrong.

But there were things people didn’t realize about her, just like there were things they’d never know about her husband or about the Boy Who Lived. Things like her cruel streak, the streak her and Harry had discovered in themselves out of necessity and that Ron, for all his tactlessness and insensitivity, simply lacked. Things like her tendency to micromanage and burn dinner while her husband happily fed the children toast and didn’t give a damn, something Harry, in his eternal quest for domestic bliss and righting the wrongs that had been done to him as a child, would never do. Things like how after work she sometimes just needed to yell at Ron, about nothing, and know that he would yell back and they would fight and that it would be meaningless in a few hours. (Ginny cried for a week the first time Harry raised his voice to her, and Harry himself probably cried for longer than that.)

And then there was the sex.

Hermione never had to walk on eggshells because she hadn’t married a seventeen year old, she had married an adult man who had seen war and death and buried his brother and still, at the end of all of that, wanted to manage a bloody joke shop. They, whoever they were, didn’t realize that for Hermione, there had never been a choice. They could speculate all they want, but Hermione knew the man she had married better than he knew himself and there were still sweltering July mornings where, at thirty-four, he surprised her.

“Fuck Rita Skeeter!” she burst out. “Who gives a shit what that nasty old bitch has to say? She can write a million more articles about us being the--the Duke and Duchess of Unkempt Hair but she’s still a nasty old bitch and we’re still…still…”

“Still us,” Ron said, bending over to press a kiss to her temple.  “I’ve always loved your hair, she’s absolutely mental if she thinks—“ But he stopped to watch, with interest, Hermione’s wave of her wand, the silencing charm, the gentle click of the door, and he appeared to lose his train of thought. “Say fuck again.”

“No,” Hermione said, but she was smiling because she knew her husband and she knew this was the kind of thing he’d take as a challenge.


End file.
